An interesting concept that's been around for a while (and is almost a mainstay with science fiction writers) is the self-replicating machine, or Von Neumann Machine, named for John von Neumann who is credited with first proposing the idea.
A self-replicating machine would, like a living organism, gather what it needs from the environment and then making a copy of itself.
Most science fiction dealing with self-replicating machines is dystopic, from The Terminator to Micheal Crichton's Prey. (Side note: most of Crichton's works, starting with the Andromeda Strain, have been cautionary tales against science and technology and for government control on such thing. So when he came out against global warming actually happening in State of Fear it was a complete switch for him. So his research into global warming must have had a profound affect on him.)
I wrote a short story about self-replicating machines called "Origin" (that I've never submitted for fear it's, by now, a tired cliche). It starts like this:
She responded to "1000000011101000010011001" so that could be called her name. Since she was at the center of her own universe's grid coordinates, call her Origin. The entity "1000000011101000010011000" signaled her. It was the one who built her. Call it Mother.
The first thing Origin saw was Mother. At first she thought Mother was special, not realizing that there were over 16 million more just like her on this planetoid alone.
"Origin: Query: Systems?" Mother asked. (Of course, her query was voiced in the same binary language as their "names" and was a radio signal, not acoustical.)
Origin knew what to do. Like a man stretching his muscles in the morning, like a neonatal baby screaming to clear its lungs, like a computer at boot-up, Origin checked every system.
"Mother: Report: Origin Nominal."
Mother did not hesitate to give what should be the penultimate command to all her offspring: "Origin: Invoke programming."
"Mother: Origin invoking." She'd replied automatically, without considering other options. She saw Mother crawl away on duel treads, scooping up rock in her massive maw at her front, below her front-facing CCD eyes.
Origin spun one tread forward and one backward to turn in another direction, then moved forward, lowering her metal jaw half a meter into the surface, her laser cutting teeth slicing through the rock. Her programming was simple: Be fruitful, and multiply.
But some how, some way, "Origin" is different, as the human in charge, Jans Rodriguez had to figure out:
Most mutations were harmful to the robot, something on the order of 99.9% of them. Often a mutated unit would simply not function correctly and was shut down by its "mother," destroyed, and recycled into a new unit at the next generation. Of the 0.1% of mutations left, most were neither positive nor negative. But there were just a few mutations, maybe as little as one in a billion or trillion of the mutations that weren't negative, that were positive. No one in GAM had ever told Rodriguez what to do if he ever encountered an actual positive mutation. And no one ever thought that after a series of random positive mutations, the odds of which were measured in numbers with large negative exponentials, that an ore-processing unit might evolve intelligence.
Of course, Origin has to figure out how to communicate with the human, and the human has to figure out how to deal with an intelligent robot that is taking control of his mining machines. And thereby hangs a quest, an obstacle for the protagonist to overcome.
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